Sanna Manjang, the former head of a Gambian paramilitary unit accused of carrying out extrajudicial killings under ex-President Yahya Jammeh, appeared before a military court in Banjul Sunday to face charges of desertion, months after prosecutors dropped a separate murder case against him.
Manjang, a lieutenant colonel who led the unit known as the “Junglers,” is accused of deserting Gambia’s armed forces for a continuous nine-year period after fleeing the country in 2017 following Jammeh’s ouster from power. He was arrested in Senegal last November and repatriated to The Gambia the following month, ending a period during which he had evaded Gambian authorities for the better part of a decade.
ATN, New York understands the case marks another attempt at accountability for killings carried out during Jammeh’s 22-year rule, coming after a murder case against Manjang collapsed in July when Gambian prosecutors said they were unable to summon witnesses, some of whom were allegedly themselves former members of the death squad Manjang once led. That earlier case had charged him with four counts of murder, including the 2004 killing of AFP correspondent Deyda Hydara, along with the deaths of three other men, one of whom prosecutors alleged Manjang personally decapitated.
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Following the collapse of the murder charges, Gambian authorities filed a separate case against Manjang over the assault of two other men, a trial that remains ongoing alongside Sunday’s desertion proceedings. The layered and shifting set of charges against Manjang illustrates the broader difficulty Gambian institutions have faced in securing convictions against former Jammeh-era security officials, even as evidence of the Junglers’ conduct has been extensively documented by international and domestic investigators.
The Junglers operated largely outside the Gambian army’s formal chain of command during Jammeh’s rule and have long been accused by United Nations human rights investigators of carrying out extrajudicial killings and torture on behalf of the government. Jammeh was forced into exile in 2017 after losing an election to Adama Barrow, then the opposition’s candidate and now Gambia’s sitting president, ending two decades in which Jammeh’s security apparatus operated with near-total impunity.
Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission, established after Jammeh’s departure to investigate abuses committed under his government, found that state security forces killed between 240 and 250 people during his rule, alongside extensive evidence of extrajudicial killings, torture, kidnappings, and what investigators described as witch hunts targeting perceived political opponents and other victims. The commission’s findings have since formed the evidentiary basis for a series of prosecutions targeting former Jammeh-era officials, both inside Gambia and abroad.
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Several of Manjang’s former colleagues among Jammeh’s inner circle of enforcers have already faced justice outside The Gambia’s own court system. Individuals connected to the Jammeh government have been detained and sentenced in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, jurisdictions that in several cases pursued prosecutions under universal jurisdiction laws allowing foreign courts to try individuals accused of grave human rights abuses regardless of where the underlying crimes occurred.
The pursuit of accountability inside Gambia itself has moved more slowly, hampered by the kind of witness-availability problems that led prosecutors to drop the murder charges against Manjang earlier this year. Gambian officials have acknowledged that many potential witnesses to Jungler-era crimes remain reluctant to testify, whether out of fear of retaliation or because some potential witnesses were themselves implicated in the unit’s activities.
Sunday’s desertion trial proceeds separately from the assault case still pending against Manjang, meaning he now faces two concurrent sets of charges in Gambian military and civilian courts even as the more serious murder allegations tied to Hydara’s killing remain unresolved. Gambian prosecutors have not indicated whether they intend to refile murder charges against Manjang should additional witnesses become available, nor have they set a timeline for concluding either of the cases currently before the courts.
No date has been set for a verdict in the desertion proceedings, and Manjang’s legal team has not issued a public statement responding to the charges heard Sunday in Banjul.
The Gambia’s approach to transitional justice has drawn close attention from international observers since President Barrow’s government committed to implementing the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission’s recommendations, which included establishing a hybrid tribunal, potentially involving international judges, to try the most serious cases arising from Jammeh’s rule. Progress on establishing that tribunal has moved slowly since the commission concluded its work, with Gambian officials citing funding constraints and the logistical complexity of coordinating with regional and international justice bodies as ongoing obstacles to bringing the full scope of alleged Jungler-era crimes before any court, domestic or hybrid.
